Now, as the florist – if you normally sell 1 dozen red roses in the cash world for $50 + GST cash, through eXmerce, you would sell the same 1 dozen red roses for $50 + GST Trade Dollars. Before completing the sale, it is best practice to ask the member to present their eXmerce member card or alternatively you can contact our office to get a pre-authorization. This step helps to ensure that the member buying from you is a legitimate member of eXmerce and also has sufficient trade funds in their trade account. A barter transaction receipt is then filled out by the seller for record keeping purposes and a copy is given to the buyer.
However, this isn’t always possible. For instance, you may have a $150 digital music player and want a small refrigerator worth $100. In this case, if both parties are certain of what they want and understand the difference in value, there should be no barterer’s remorse. Alternatively, you can ask for the mini-fridge plus $50 to make the trade – the worst anyone can say is “no.”
While there are most certainly safety considerations – and in some cases, a time commitment – bartering can be quite rewarding. You may not have a surplus of spendable money, but you do have talents, skills, and miscellaneous goods that are just as good as cash. With a little thought, and willingness to make the effort, you can use bartering to obtain the goods and services you want without impeding your cash flow.
As Orlove noted, barter may occur in commercial economies, usually during periods of monetary crisis. During such a crisis, currency may be in short supply, or highly devalued through hyperinflation. In such cases, money ceases to be the universal medium of exchange or standard of value. Money may be in such short supply that it becomes an item of barter itself rather than the means of exchange. Barter may also occur when people cannot afford to keep money (as when hyperinflation quickly devalues it).[15]

Economic historian Karl Polanyi has argued that where barter is widespread, and cash supplies limited, barter is aided by the use of credit, brokerage, and money as a unit of account (i.e. used to price items). All of these strategies are found in ancient economies including Ptolemaic Egypt. They are also the basis for more recent barter exchange systems.[17]

Her answer came, finally, in an unlikely place: at a bar on Robson Street in Vancouver during the Winter Olympics. It was close to midnight, and she was waiting in line for a drink. All around her, people were partying—except for the two women in front of her, who were dissecting the differences between tax-free savings accounts and RRSPs. Simmons barged in to their conversation. “What do you want to know about TFSAs?” she asked. “What’s your goal?” She pulled the two aside and, for 20 minutes, gave an impromptu finance session. As a gesture of thanks, the two women bought Simmons and her group a round of beer. “I can’t afford financial advice,” one of them told Simmons, “but at least I can give everybody here a beer.” Then, Simmons felt like a cartoon megawatt bulb appeared over her head. It is all you can do, she thought. It is all you can do. There, in the middle of the crowded bar, she blurted, “Oh my god! I’m bringing barter back!”
No, said Mises, for if taken back far enough, there comes a point at which money first emerges as a medium of exchange out of a pure barter economy Prior to this, it is valued only for its non-monetary uses as a commodity The demand for money is therefore pushed back to the last day of barter, where goods are traded only in direct exchange, and where the temporal element of the regression theorem ends It is in this way that all charges of circularity are obviated.

While Swapsity trades are facilitated online, its participants can be seen in real life at themed in-person swap meets as well as the annual Live Green Toronto Festival. Over the past three years, more than 25,000 items—primarily clothes, books, CDs and DVDs—have been swapped at its events, collectively saving people roughly $200,000. About 5,000 items have been donated to charity. On average, each participant saves $80 at every swap (the value of items they go home with and would have otherwise bought). This year’s Live Green event was packed despite the grey July weather: until it started to rain heavily in the late afternoon, lineups to get into the six swapping tents spanned the full length of the waiting area, then folded in on themselves like accordions. Even in the rain, the leaking tents bustled.

Anthropologists have argued, in contrast, "that when something resembling barter does occur in stateless societies it is almost always between strangers, people who would otherwise be enemies."[6] Barter occurred between strangers, not fellow villagers, and hence cannot be used to naturalisticly explain the origin of money without the state. Since most people engaged in trade knew each other, exchange was fostered through the extension of credit.[4][7] Marcel Mauss, author of 'The Gift', argued that the first economic contracts were to not act in one's economic self-interest, and that before money, exchange was fostered through the processes of reciprocity and redistribution, not barter.[8] Everyday exchange relations in such societies are characterized by generalized reciprocity, or a non-calculative familial "communism" where each takes according to their needs, and gives as they have.[9]